


Relearning

by dawittiest



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes-centric, Dissociation, Gen, Memory Issues, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6792370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>His name is Bucky. That's the first lesson.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>His name is Zimnij Soldat. That's the second lesson.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>After the events of CA:TWS Bucky has to relearn things. (Spoilers for CA:CW)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relearning

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the warnings. It’s a Winter Soldier story, so I think this is self-explanatory.
> 
> It’s gen because I thought that this is too soon for Bucky to form any romantic relationship and I didn’t want a ship to take the main focus but I guess it can also be read as Bucky x everyone if that’s how you swing. Ship your heart out.
> 
> Thanks @ amazing autumnchris for beta!

He has to relearn things.

His name is Bucky. That's the first lesson. He repeats it like a mantra in his head, walking with his shoulders strung and his finger itching for a trigger, under his breath in a grocery store, trying and failing to desperately hang onto something familiar and calming. B-U-C-K-Y, one word, five letters, repeated, constantly, until they blur together and lose their meaning, the only thing anchoring his feeble grasp on reality. His name is Bucky. As long as he remembers that, he won't slip.

He goes to the Smithsonian and watches the unfamiliar face of James Buchanan Barnes and reads about his just as unfamiliar life. This is important, somehow. He can't yet comprehend fully why but he commits it to his memory nonetheless, dutifully cataloguing every date, every trivia. That part is easy. It's remembering that is hard. (He thinks that maybe he's not James Buchanan Barnes and never will be. But he can be Bucky, he thinks, and maybe that's enough).

There are days when he can't remember anything but white Siberian winter and he desperately thinks, "Bucky" and tries to hold on to it. There are days when he wakes up covered in cold sweat, his dreams full of blue eyes and stubborn, stupidly brave boys and a war he doesn't remember. They're maybe not worse than his nightmares (blood and screams and pain, and the sound the human spine makes cracking under his hands like a twig) but they're just as bad in their own way. He catches himself walking down the street or cooking dinner and thinking things like, "it's almost May the sixth I need to remember to get daisies for my sister’s birthday" or "Steve would have hated it, he never liked my overcooked broth" and he freezes with one leg mid-step and a hand half raised to his mouth, his gut clenching on something awful and empty. He never knows what to do with it, these little pieces of information from the life past, but he faithfully writes it all down, in twenty seven notebooks, four hundred thirty two thousand words on eight hundred sixty four pages in (his) unfamiliar loopy hand-writing. He doesn't know what to do with it, doesn't know how to tell dreams from memories but maybe what he can do is remember. (Remembering is hard but numbers help).

One word, five letters. B-U-C-K-Y.

 

Relearning comes with pain, he finds out.

"Your name is James Buchanan Barnes," the man says and he feels _fury_ , the kind he forgot how to feel, the kind maybe he never felt before in his life.

_"SHUT UP!"_

Seven broken and nine fractured bones, four bullets, two liters of lost blood. Steve finds out that learning comes with pain the hard way.

(Sometimes numbers don't help).

 

His name is Zimnij Soldat. That's the second lesson. He used to know that, maybe, but he needs to relearn it all over again. This used to mean that there were orders and he had to comply. Now it means shaking on the cold bathroom floor and vomiting with his cheek against the cool porcelain. It means the faces constantly flashing under his eyelids, countless nameless victims, Howard, his wife (they had a son, he later finds out. He was a kid when he smashed Howard's nose into his brain and crushed his wife's throat. He must be almost in his fifties now). It means knowing things. Like the sound a person makes when they drown in their own blood. Like exactly how much force to apply to break someone's neck or how a splattered brain looks like against the pink of a nursery wallpaper.

He never thought before that knowing things could hurt so much.

 

Some things he expects to have to relearn but some of them take him by surprise.

He has to relearn gentleness. He's sitting on a bench in a park trying to scribble down half-a-memory before it fades out when he feels somebody approaching him behind. He freezes. He thinks about seven different ways of neutralizing the threat before he exhales and consciously forces his muscles to relax. He turns around.

It's a girl, probably in her twenties, and, judging by her tattered dress, from a poor family, or maybe it's a fashion statement. It's so hard to tell nowadays. She looks up at him and smiles.

"What are you writing?" she asks with an easy, open expression. Friendly, maybe. Bucky stares until the smile slides off the girl's face and she quickly walks away, disquieted. Belatedly he realizes that he should have replied.

(He can't stop thinking about the crunch her skull would've made breaking under his fist).

One day he looks in the mirror and realizes he needs a haircut (he avoids looking at himself these days if he can help it). The discovery startles the laugh out of him that turns into a cry, big, ugly sobs escaping his lips, tears and snot running down his face.

He has _hair_. The thought is so alien. He looks at his hands. He has _hands_ and he has hair, and he needs to shower and eat and sleep, and apparently get a fucking haircut because his hair has gotten too damn long.

Fuck. What a head trip.

 

It's not his fault. That's a lesson he'll never stop relearning. _Bang!_ And a woman's eyes roll into her skull, her cheeks still wet with tears and her face frozen in a pleading cry. _Crack!_ And a baby's wailing cuts off mid-sob. _Not my fault, not my fault, not my fault,_ wheezed between retching, _notmyfaultnotmyfaultnotmyfault_ between broken _"H-Howard..."_ and _"Spare my wife..."_ but the Winter Soldier doesn't know mercy, _Not my fault, it wasn't me, it wasn't_ me--

He doesn't know what he is.

 

It's not his fault but it doesn't matter. That, too, seems is a lesson he'll never stop relearning.

"I don't do that anymore."

"Well, the people who think you did it are coming here right now. And they're not planning on taking you alive."

_Smart_ , he thinks. It's not his fault but it seems he'll never stop paying.

_I don't do that anymore_ , and this time, _really_ , he didn't do that but it seems like even that doesn't matter, and the universe has funny ideas about retribution because somehow he managed to anger _a king_ and he didn't do a damn thing.

_It would be so easy_ , he thinks. God knows he can never pay enough. If his death can give peace to even one man... It's better than he deserves anyway.

_No_ , he thinks and the naked, vehement force surprises him. _Not yet_. And then, _don't let Steve see that._

 

Steve doesn't understand.

"What you did all those years… It wasn’t you," he says, looking at the ground. He can tell he's uncomfortable. "You didn’t have a choice."

_I know_ , he thinks. _You don't_   _u n d e r s t a n d_.

"But I did it," he says.

 

Tony Stark understands.

"I don't care," he says and Bucky realizes that fateful December night he didn’t kill just two people. "He killed _my mom_."

It's amazing, the human instinct to survive. It's amazing – he contemplated putting a bullet in his brain himself, many times, but when Tony Stark (Howard's son, and he can't stop thinking about him as a child even if the man lived more years than him out of the ice) turns his repulsors on him the instinct kicks in, and it's so easy, it's all muscle memory, he doesn't even have to think about that, upper-cut, jab the shield between the shoulder plates, blow, blow, blow, and his metal fingers are tightening around the power source, ready to finish it.

In the end, no one wins this fight.

Not dying has never felt so much like a defeat.

 

He has to relearn emotions. That particular lesson comes somewhat belatedly.

They're living in one of the many royal residences near the capital of Wakanda where T'Challa has assured them no one would find them, weeks after the events of Siberia. Bucky's out of the ice for now; Wakandan science couldn't erase the triggers Hydra put in his brain but it could at least disable them. ("It's just a temporary measure," T'Challa told him. "Do not lose your faith. I'm certain with time we'll be able to remedy it definitively." If Bucky thought about it, he would have thought he feels remorse. He tries not to dwell too hard though on the messy feelings and tentative truce between him and T'Challa. He's just grateful). He's sitting at the table barefoot with Steve on his left side, staring at his half-full plate while Steve is discussing with Natasha the strategy to break out his friends from the Raft. For the past weeks, ever since Natasha joined them in Wakanda, it's all they talk about, ways in, the layouts of the prison, exit strategies, hunched over the blueprints Natasha somehow managed to obtain (Steve doesn't ask and she doesn't bring this up), going over every last detail of their plan. T'Challa never joins them. (Sometimes Bucky thinks he feels guilty that he's the reason Natasha has to hide here with them instead of living in the Avengers compound. But that's ridiculous. T'Challa is a king. He surely has better things to do than sit around with fugitives from justice).

"It will be tricky but I'm positive I can find the way in," Natasha is saying. They are talking about surveillance or something like that. "Tony didn't design the whole system for the Raft but it was based on some of his code. He always leaves himself a backdoor."

"Are you sure about this?" Steve asks with a frown. "I mean..."

"You don't understand," Natasha says softly. "He left the backdoor for _us_."

Steve's stunned silence rings out in the room. Then he sighs, weary, and drags a hand over his face.

"I don't know, Nat," he says sullenly. "You didn't see him in Siberia. Tony..."

"Why didn't you tell him," Bucky suddenly interrupts him.

Natasha quietly slides off her chair and leaves the room. Steve looks at him but Bucky refuses to meet his eyes. He doesn't know which one of them is more taken aback. He focuses on his bare feet on the wooden floor. It's so stupid. Why doesn't he have shoes?

"Why didn't you tell him," Bucky repeats, murmuring under his breath. Steve is silent for a moment, regarding him.

"I think I wanted to spare us all the pain," he says quietly after a while.

Bucky jerks his head abruptly.

"You should've told him," he grunts. Steve stares at him without a word.

Suddenly he realizes that he's angry. For a second the discovery distracts him.

"Buck," Steve says.

The anger comes back in full force.

"What did you think--" he cuts off. "Didn't you think--didn't you think he would find out eventually?"

"Bucky," Steve says, his eyes pleading. " _I wanted to protect you_."

"Well, that--that didn't go quite as planned, did it," he forces. God. He tries to smile, maybe, but the corners of his mouth draw down bitterly instead. He wraps his arms around himself and breathes out harshly through his nostrils. He doesn't know what to do with his anger.

"No," Steve says, choked. "It didn't."

"You should've told him sooner," Bucky says again. "Maybe he wouldn't have tried to bash my brain in then."

He hears Steve inhale sharply. He doesn't take it back. They fall silent for a while.

"I'm sorry," Steve finally says.

"Yeah," Bucky says. He closes his eyes. The anger is still there. It takes a while to relearn to make sense of his emotions.

It takes even longer to relearn that he's allowed to act on them.

 

Natasha helps.

It's easy, being with her. Steve... Steve expects things. He looks at him like he's the sun but every time Bucky opens his mouth his shoulders fall a bit lower, his eyes grow a bit more sad (he can't help but _look_ , he was trained to _see_ things, he can't just _stop_ _seeing_ them even if he wished he could). He feels like he's disappointing him by just being.

Natasha though, Natasha doesn't expect anything. She doesn't need him to be Bucky because she never knew him (it's rewarding to be Bucky, and he thinks that maybe that's the only reason why he didn't just pull the trigger and end this charade, but sometimes it's _too much_ ). She doesn't expect him even to be the Winter Soldier. She _understands_.

One night she finds him standing in the dark of his bedroom staring unseeingly through the window at the night. She stays for a while, silent.

"What is it?" he asks after a moment. Natasha doesn't pretend to not understand. He's grateful.

"That day in Berlin," she says, her voice soft but steel underneath. He tenses. "Did you recognize me?"

"You were with Steve in D.C.," he says. "And before, in Odessa. I shot my target through you."

He remembers all of them.

Natasha nods.

"Yes. But that wasn't our first meeting."

He looks at her, sharply. Her eyes are fixed on the window. He can see the studiously relaxed way she's holding herself, almost perfect enough to be natural. Almost.

"San Paolo. The fire of the hospital," he realizes. "That was you."

Her face doesn't give away anything.

"Among other things," she says carefully. "I built quite a reputation for myself. Not only as the Black Widow."

"The Slavic Shadow," he realizes. "The Red Death. That was you."

The corner of her mouth twitches. Her eyelids drop slightly. He knows he's only seeing these things because she's letting him.

Suddenly, he _feels_ something. A bond, maybe. She   _u n d e r s t a n d s_.

It takes a while to relearn feelings, too.

 

He can never trust himself. He thought he had long learned that lesson but he keeps relearning it, again, and again.

He knew that, he knew that he can never trust himself again, that he can't trust his thoughts and he can't trust his senses, because both his brain and his body are no longer his own, but there's knowing and there's _knowing_ and it seems that he has to learn his lessons the hard way.

He knows what it feels like to be utterly at someone's mercy. He knows, intimately, the anatomy of being vulnerable, laid bare, a passenger in his own body, as if just there to watch, but he _never_ felt quite as powerless as that day in Berlin.

“Желание.” _(It's so easy,_ he thinks _. So fragile)._

“Ржавый.” _(Just like that,_ everything _, everything he fought for, sweat and pain and blood, and just like that, it doesn't matter)._

“Семнадцать.” _(It's worse, oh it’s so much_ worse _than it was before. This time he has something to lose)._

“Рассвет.” _(It's funny,_ he thinks idly _. How everything just loses its meaning)._

“Печь.” _(It’s so easy)._

“Девять.” _(He forgot how easy it is)._

“Добросердечный.” _(There’s no conscious decision to make)._

“Возвращение на родину.” _(It's in his veins, it's in his brain synapses)._

“Один.” _(So easy. Peaceful. Everything falls away and all that remains are…)_

“Грузовой вагон.” _(…his orders)._

 

“Солдат?”

“Я готов подчиняться.”

 

 

He has to trust himself. It's T'Challa who makes him realize he has to learn that lesson.

"Mr Barnes," he addresses him.

An inappropriate laughter threatens to spill out his lips.

"Just Bucky," he mumbles. T'Challa nods.

"Bucky," he says and the name sounds foreign in his mouth. "Spar with me."

He's so surprised that he goes without protest.

(It never was a request anyway).

He has a new arm prosthesis (after Howard’s son has ripped his old arm off), courtesy of T'Challa. It's different from the one he used to have. More fluid, more natural, somehow. It's obvious that its primary use is not that of a weapon. He rarely puts it on though. He gets used to living without it, to getting by with just one arm. The arm Hydra has given him has never felt like a part of him anyway. (If he's being honest, he doesn't trust himself with two functioning arms).

He puts it on now though and tentatively circles T'Challa on the mat in the training room, not able to shake the feeling of being watched by a predator (he's not used to being put in the reversed role. It's off-putting). He's not sure what T'Challa expects from him.

"Now what?" he mumbles.

"Now we fight," T'Challa says simply.

For a moment it's almost soothing. His muscles easily find their rhythm and he doesn't even need to think about it, going through the motions with a practiced steady confidence. This is the dance he knows well. T'Challa presents enough challenge for it to be entertaining and he's probably the first person against whom he ever had to put up a real fight, and it's oddly - his mind stumbles on the word - _fun_ , to have someone to train with, not because of a mission but just _because_ , for the sole purpose of-- dunno, unwinding. It's fun, until it isn't, and his hands go automatically to snap T'Challa's neck and he freezes, and suddenly he lands hard on the mat.

For a while they're quiet.

"You hesitated," T'Challa finally says.

"I know," he mumbles, pressing his fingers into his eye sockets. T'Challa pauses.

"I would've blocked that with ease. You let yourself become distracted, you threw the fight."

_"I KNOW!"_ he roars, his bared teeth millimeters from T'Challa's face. He doesn't know when he moved so close.

T'Challa regards him silently. Bucky pinches his eyes and clutches painfully on his hair.

"You were as much a victim of the Winter Soldier as the people you were forced to kill, Bucky Barnes," T'Challa says finally. "Yet the leaders of the world declared you guilty and set to hunt you down like an animal. I regret to have been one of them. And still, your biggest enemy through it all remained your own self." Bucky looks up at him. "But now you're among friends," T'Challa says gently. "You have to learn to trust yourself again. And you have to learn again how to fight."

"I don't do that anymore," he repeats (it seems like he always has to repeat that), mumbling under his nose. T'Challa’s eyes lock on his own.

"I'm a warrior. So are you. You were a warrior long before you became the Winter Soldier for Hydra. You need to remember how to fight to defend." T'Challa extends his hand to him. Bucky takes it and pulls himself up.

"You don't have to do this," he says, holding his gaze. This is important.

"I have done you a great wrong," T'Challa says. There's no self-explanation in his voice, no apology. It's just a statement. "Let me do this for you now."

He nods, his throat suddenly thick. T'Challa releases his hand and moves to the fighting stance.

"Again?" he says, his brow raising a little.

This, too, is not a request.

 

The life goes on. That's probably the most surprising lesson of all.

Sam Wilson, he decides, is the most _insufferable_ man in the world. He rides him _constantly_ and refuses to go easy on him with the smallest things (Don't think he forgot that thing with a car seat. He took _offense_ to that). If there's a way to make it harder for him, you can bet that Sam Wilson will find it and will wait for Bucky to say something just so he can say no. After some time Bucky learns how to work with it. Because Sam Wilson, he decides, is the most _hilarious_ man in the world to annoy. It takes a while for him to figure out all his weak spots and pet peeves but when he does figure it out it makes it all oh-so-worthy. Sam makes the most satisfying groans of annoyance and Bucky secretly relishes in every single one.

Sam Wilson, he also discovers, is the _perfect_ man to double-team on Steve with.

"Hey, Steve," Sam says nonchalantly, leaning with one arm behind his head on the hood of the car. Bucky sends him a covert stink eye. See, if he did that, he'd look just stupid. But somehow Sam manages to make it work. "You know, now that I think about it, I think Sharon once mentioned she has a niece. I figure you just gotta wait a couple years until Sharon hits her nineties and that one's just right for you."

Steve's face instantly flashes a bright tomato and his features scrunch in a sour grimace.

"Yeah, Stevie," Bucky picks up. "Remember Annie Price from across the hall? You used to bring her stolen flowers from Mrs P's window. I bet her granddaughter still lives in NYC."

"Will you _ever_ let that go," Steve grunts, his grim scowl spoiled by the flaming pink of his cheeks. Gotta bless that fair Irish skin.

" _Never_ ," they say in agreement.

 

His name is Bucky _(one word, five letters. B-U-C-K-Y)._ Each day he has to relearn things. The life goes on.


End file.
